THE LITTLE LIBRARY’ 


For 4-6 year olds 


A Child’s Garden of Verse 

Little Jack Rabbit 

A Visit from St. Nicholas : 

Dame Wiggins of Lee and Her Seven 
Wonderful Cats 

Sing-Song and Other Poems by 
Christina Rossetti 

The Little Wooden Doll 

A Baby’s Life of Jesus Christ 

Charlie and His Kitten Topsy 


For 6-8 year olds 


Thumbelina 

The Cat and the Captain 

The Little Children’s Bible 
The Light Princess 

The King of the Golden River 
Silver Pennies 

A Dog of Flanders 

The Pope’s Mule 

Memoirs of a Donkey 

The Peep-Show Man 

The Peter Pan Picture Book 
Memoirs of a London Doll 
The Little Lame Prince 

The Adventures of a Brownie 
Goody Two Shoes 

The Magic Forest 

Susanna’s Auction 


For 8-10 year olds 


Little Dog Toby 

The Niirnberg Stove 

The Good-Natured Beat 

The Merry Pilgrimage 

The Sons of Kai 

The Rose and the Ring 

King Penguin—A Legend of the South 
Seas 


ONE DOLLAR EACH 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


i Come 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 


Oy laos. 193 y. 
or Mobil . 


THE LITTLE LIBRARY 


For 4-6 YEAR Ops 


A CuHILp’s GARDEN OF VERSES 

LittLe JAcK RABBIT 

A VisiT From St. NicHOLAsS 

Dame Wiccins oF LEE anp HER SEVEN 
WoNDERFUL Cats 

Sinc-SonG AND OTHER PoEmMs By CHRISTINA 
ROSsETTI 

Tue LirtteE Woopen Dori 

A Basy’s Lire or Jesus CHRIST 

CHARLIE AND His Kitten Topsy 


For 6-8 Year OLps 


THUMBELINA 

Tue Cat aND THE CAPTAIN 
CHARLIE AND His FRIENDS 

Tue LitrLe CHILDREN’S BIBLE 
Tue Licut PRINcEsS 

Ture Kinc oF THE GOLDEN RIVER 
SILVER PENNIES 

A Doc or FLANDERS 

Tue Pore’s MULE 

Memorrs oF A DONKEY 

Tue Prer-SHow Man 

Tue Peter Pan Picture Boox 
Memoirs oF A Lonpon DoLi 
Tue LittLeE Lame PrINcE 

Tue ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE 
Goopy Two SHOES 

THe Macic Forest 

Susanna’s AUCTION 


For 8-10 Yrear Ops 


LittLtE Doc Tosy 

THe NURNBERG STOVE 

THE Goopv-NaturED BEaR 

THE MERRY PILGRIMAGE 

Tue Sons or Kar 

Tue RosE AND THE RING 

cape Pencuin—A LEGEND OF THE SOUTH 
EAS 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


“AND YOU SHALL LIGHT A FIRE EVERY MORNING 
IN HIRSCHVOGEL. 


Che 
Niirnberg Stove 


By OUIDA 
(Louise De La Rame) 


PICTURES BY FRANK BOYD 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK MCMXXVIII 


All rights reserved 


CopyricuT, 1928, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


Set up and electrotyped. 
Published, September, 1928. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
BY STRATFORD PRESS, INC. 


3 
. 
Pe 
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; 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


“AND YOU SHALL LIGHT A FIRE EVERY MORN- 


ING IN HIRSCHVOGEL.” . j Frontispiece 
PAGE 
THE BOY DARTED IN WITH THE BEER ., : cf 


AUGUST WAS THE ARTIST OF THE FAMILY ° 17 


THE MEN FROM MUNICH BORE THE STOVE 
AWAY . : 4 - 4 : g 51 


“GO AFTER IT WHEN YOU ARE BIGGER,’ SAID 
THE NEIGHBOR ; ; > - ; 55 


“GRANDER THAN THE STOVE OF HOHEN- 
SALZBURG!” ., ; ; cs é ; 81 


A VENETIAN RAPIER CAME TO BLOWS WITH 
A FERRARA SABER . 2 s : ‘ 93 


“‘T AM THE PRINCESS OF SAXE-ROYALE.”’ . 97 


ie 


a 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 


oil 
ue he 


Vil 


ay) 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 


I 


Aveust lived in a little town called 
Hall. Hall is a favorite name for several 
towns in Austria and in Germany; but 
this one special little Hall, in the Upper 
Innthal, is one of the most charming Old- 
World places that I know, and August 
for his part did not know any other. It 
has the green meadows and the great 
mountains all about it, and the gray- 
green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It 


has paved streets and enchanting little 
1 


2 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


shops that have all latticed panes and iron 
gratings to them; it has a very grand old 
Gothic church, which has the noblest 
blendings of light and shadow, and marble 
tombs of dead knights, and a look of in- 
finite strength and repose as a church 
should have. ‘Then there is the Muntze 
Tower, black and white, rising out of 
greenery and looking down on a long 
wooden bridge and the broad rapid river; 
and there is an old schloss which has been 
made into a guardhouse, with battlements 
and frescoes and heraldic devices in gold 
and colors, and a man-at-arms carved in 
stone standing life-size in his niche and 
bearing his date, 1530. <A little farther on, 
but close at hand, is a cloister with beau- 
tiful marble columns and tombs, and a 
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside 
that a small and very rich chapel: indeed, 
so full is the little town of the undisturbed 
past, that to walk in it is like opening a 
missal of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned 
and illuminated with saints and warriors, 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 3 


and it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, 
by reason of its monuments and its his- 
toric color, that I marvel much no one has 
ever cared to sing its praises. The old 
pious heroic life of an age at once more 
restful and more brave than ours still 
leaves its spirit there, and then there is the 
girdle of the mountains all around, and 
that alone means strength, peace, maj- 
esty. 

In this little town a few years ago 
August Strehla lived with his people in 
the stone-paved irregular square where 
the grand church stands. 

He was a small boy of nine at that 
time—a chubby-faced little man with 
rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of 
curls brown as ripe nuts. His mother 
was dead, his father was poor, and there 
were many mouths at home to feed. In 
this country the winters are long and very 
cold, the whole land lies wrapped in snow 
for many months, and this night that he 
was trotting home, with a jug of beer in 


4 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


his numb red hands, was terribly cold and 
dreary. The good burghers of Hall had 
shut their double shutters, and the few 
lamps there were flickered dully behind 
their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. 
The mountains indeed were beautiful, all 
snow-white under the stars that are so big 
in frost. Hardly anyone was astir; a few 
good souls going home from vespers, a 
tired postboy who blew a shrill blast 
from his tasseled horn as he pulled up his 
sledge before a hostelry, and little August, 
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged 
sheepskin coat, were all who were 
abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the 
good folks of Hall go early to their beds. 
He could not run, or he would have 
spilled the beer; he was half frozen and a 
little frightened, but he kept up his cour- 
age by saying over and over again to him- 
self, “I shall soon be at home with dear 
Hirschvogel.” 

He went on through the streets, past 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 5 


the stone man-at-arms of the guardhouse, 
and so into the place where the great 
church was, and where near it stood the 
house of his father, Karl Strehla, which 
had a sculptured Bethlehem over the door- 
way, and the Pilgrimage of the Three 
Kings painted on its wall. He had been 
sent on a long errand outside the gates in 
the afternoon, over the frozen fields and 
the broad white snow, and had been be- 
lated, and had thought he heard the wolves 
behind him at every step, and had reached 
the town in a great state of terror, thank- 
ful with all his little panting heart to see 
the oil lamp burning under the first house- 
shrine. But he had not forgotten to call 
for the beer, and he carried it carefully 
now, though his hands were so numb that 
he was afraid they would let the jug down 
every moment. 

The snow outlined with white every 
gable and cornice of the beautiful old 
wooden houses; the moonlight shone on 


6 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


the gilded signs, the lambs, the grapes, the 
eagles, and all the quaint devices that 
hung before the doors; covered lamps 
burned before the Nativities and Cruci- 
fixions painted on the walls or let into the 
woodwork; here and there, where a 
shutter had not been closed, a ruddy fire- 
light lit up a homely interior, with the 
noisy band of children clustering round 
the house-mother and a big brown loaf, or 
some gossips spinning and listening to the 
cobbler’s or the barber’s story of a neigh- 
bor, while the oil wicks glimmered, and 
the hearth logs blazed, and the chestnuts 
sputtered in their iron roasting pot. Lit- 
tle August saw all these things, as he saw 
everything with his two big bright eyes 
that had such curious lights and shadows 
in them; but he went heedfully on his way 
for the sake of the beer which a single slip 
of the foot would make him spill. At his 
knock and call the solid oak door, four 
centuries old if one, flew open, and the 
boy darted in with his beer, and shouted, 


THE BOY DARTED IN WITH THE BEER. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 9 


with all the force of mirthful lungs, “Oh, 
dear Hirschvogel, but for the thought of 
you I should have died!” 

It was a large barren room into which 
he rushed with so much pleasure, and 
the bricks were bare and uneven. It hada 
walnut-wood press, handsome and very 
old, a broad deal table, and several wooden 
stools for all its furniture; but at the top 
of the chamber, sending out warmth and 
color together as the lamp shed its rays 
upon it, was a tower of porcelain, bur- 
nished with all the hues of a king’s peacock 
and a queen’s jewels, and surmounted 
with armed figures, and shields, and flow- 
ers of heraldry, and a great golden crown 
upon the highest summit of all. 


Ir was a stove of 1532, and on it were 
the letters “H. R. H.,” for it was in every 
portion the handwork of the great potter 
of Niirnberg, Augustin Hirschvogel, who 
put his mark thus, as all the world knows. 

The stove no doubt had stood in palaces 
and been made for princes, had warmed 
the crimson stockings of cardinals and the 


gold-broidered shoes of archduchesses, had 
10 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 11 


glowed in presence-chambers and lent its 
carbon to help kindle sharp brains in anx- 
ious councils of state; no one knew what it 
had seen or done or been fashioned for; 
but it was a right royal thing. Yet per- 
haps it had never been more useful than 
it was now in this poor, desolate room, 
sending down heat and comfort into the 
troop of children tumbled together on a 
wolfskin at its feet, who received frozen 
August among them with loud shouts of 
joy. 

“Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, 
so cold!” said August, kissing its gilded 
lion’s claws. “Is father not in, Dor- 
othea?”’ 

“No, dear. He is late.” 

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark- 
haired and serious, and with a sweet, sad 
face, for she had had many cares laid on 
her shoulders, even while still a mere baby. 
She was the eldest of the Strehla family, 
and there were ten of them in all. Next 
to her there came Jan and Karl and Otho, 


12 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


big lads, gaining a little for their own liv- 
ing; and then came August, who went up 
in the summer to the high Alps with the 
farmers’ cattle, but in winter could do 
nothing to fill his own little platter and 
pot; and then all the little ones, who could 
only open their mouths to be fed like 
young birds—Albrecht and Hilda, and 
Waldo:-and Christof, and, last of all, little 
three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like 
forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them 
the life of their mother. 

They were of that mixed race, half Aus- 
trian, half Italian, so common in the 
Tyrol; some of the children were white 
and golden as lilies, others were brown and 
brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. ‘The 
father was a good man, but weak and 
weary with so many to find for and so 
little to do it with. He worked at the salt 
furnaces, and by that gained a few florins; 
people said he would have worked better 
and kept his family more easily if he had 
not loved his pipe and a draught of ale 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 13 


too well; but this had been said of him only 
after his wife’s death, when trouble and 
perplexity had begun to dull a brain never 
too vigorous, and to enfeeble further a 
character already too yielding. As it was, 
the wolf often bayed at the door of the 
Strehla household, without a wolf from 
the mountains coming down. Dorothea 
was one of those maidens who almost work 
miracles, so far can their industry and 
care and intelligence make a home sweet 
and wholesome and a single loaf seem to 
swell into twenty. The children were al- 
ways clean and happy, and the table was 
seldom without its big pot of soup once 
a day. Still, very poor they were, and 
Dorothea’s heart ached with shame, for 
she knew that their father’s debts were 
many for flour and meat and clothing. Of 
fuel to feed the big stove they had always 
enough without cost, for their mother’s 
father was alive, and sold wood and fir 
cones and coke, and never grudged them 
to his grandchildren, though he grumbled 


14 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


at Strehla’s improvidence and hapless, 
dreamy ways. 

“Father says we are never to wait for 
him: we will have supper now that you 
have come home, dear,” said Dorothea, 
who, however she might fret her soul in 
secret as she knitted their hose and mended 
their shirts, never let her anxieties cast a 
gloom on the children; only to August she 
did speak a little sometimes, because he 
was so thoughtful and so tender of her 
always, and knew as well as she did that 
there were troubles about money—though 
these troubles were vague to them both, 
and the debtors were patient and kindly, 
being neighbors all in the old twisting 
streets between the guardhouse and the 
river. 

Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with 
big slices of brown bread swimming in it 
and some onions bobbing up and down; 
the bowl was soon emptied by ten wooden 
spoons, and then the three eldest boys 
slipped off to bed, being tired with their 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 15 


rough bodily labor in the snow all day, and 
Dorothea drew her spinning wheel by the 
stove and set it whirring, and the little 
ones got August down upon the old, worn 
wolfskin and clamored to him for a pic- 
ture ora story. For August was the artist 
of the family. 

He had a piece of planed deal that his 
father had given him, and some sticks of 
charcoal, and he would draw a hundred 
things he had seen in the day, sweeping 
each out with his elbow when the children 
had seen enough of it, and sketching an- 
other in its stead—faces, and dogs’ heads, 
and men in sledges, and old women in 
their furs, and pine trees, and cocks and 
hens, and all sorts of animals, and now 
and then—very reverently—a Madonna 
and Child. It was all very rough, for there 
was no one to teach him anything. But it 
was all lifelike, and kept the whole troop 
of children shrieking with laughter, or 
watching breathless, with wide open, won- 
dering, awed eyes. 


16 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


They were all so happy: what did they 
care for the snow outside? ‘Their little 
bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; 
even ‘Dorothea, troubled about the bread 
for the morrow, laughed as she spun; and 
August, with all his soul in his work, and 
rosy little Ermengilda’s cheek on his 
shoulder, glowing after his frozen after- 
noon, cried out loud, smiling, as he looked 
up at the stove that was shedding its heat 
down on them all: 

“Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost 
as great and good as the sun! No; you 
are greater and better, I think, because he 
goes away, nobody knows where, all these 
long, dark, cold hours, and does not care 
how people die for want of him; but you 
—you are always ready: just a little bit 
of wood to feed you, and you will make 
a summer for us all the winter through!” 

The grand old stove seemed to smile 
through all its iridescent surface at the 
praises of the child. No doubt the stove, 
though it had known three centuries and 


—)\ 


AUGUST WAS THE ARTIST OF THE FAMILY. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 19 


more, had known but very little grati- 
tude. 

It was one of those magnificent stoves 
in enameled faience which so excited the 
jealousy of the other potters of Nurnberg 
that in a body they demanded of the mag- 
istracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should 
be forbidden to make any more of them— 
the magistracy, happily, proving of a 
broader mind, and having no sympathy 
with the wish of the artisans to cripple 
their greater fellow. 

It was of great height and breadth, with 
all the majolica luster which Hirschvogel 
learned to give to his enamels when he was 
making love to the young Venetian girl 
whom he afterwards married. There was 
the statue of a king at each corner, mod- 
eled with as much force and splendor as 
his friend Albrecht Diirer could have 
given them on copperplate or canvas. The 
body of the stove itself was divided into 
panels, which had the Ages of Man 
painted on them in polychrome; the bor- 


20 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


ders of the panels had roses and holly and 
laurel and other foliage, and German 
mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World 
moralizing, such as the old 'Teutons, and 
the Dutch after them, love to have on 
their chimney places and their drinking 
cups, their dishes and flagons. ‘The whole 
was burnished with gilding in many parts, 
and was radiant everywhere with that 
brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel 
family, painters on glass and great in 
chemistry as they were, were all masters. 

The stove was a very grand thing, as I 
say: possibly Hirschvogel had made it for 
some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time 
when he was an imperial guest at Inn- 
spruck and fashioned so many things for 
the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philip- 
pine Welser, the burgher’s daughter, who 
gained an archduke’s heart by her beauty, 
and the right to wear his honors by her 
wit. Nothing was known of the stove at 
this latter day in Hall. The grandfather 
Strehla, who had been a master mason, 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 21 


had dug it up out of some ruins where he 
was building, and, finding it without a 
flaw, had taken it home, and thought it 
worth finding only because it was such a 
good one to burn. That was now sixty 
years past, and ever since then the stove 
had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, 
warming three generations of the Strehla 
family, and having seen nothing prettier 
perhaps in all its many years than the chil- 
dren tumbled now in a cluster like gath- 
ered flowers at its feet. For the Strehla 
children, born to nothing else, were all 
born with beauty: white or brown, they 
were equally lovely to look upon, and 
when they went into the church to mass, 
with their curling locks and their clasped 
hands, they stood under the grim statues 
like cherubs flown down off some fresco. 


SSS 


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LSS 
6S SSeS SS ee 


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swasa¥ LY v 


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“TELL us a story, August,” they cried, 
in chorus, when they had seen charcoal 
pictures till they were tired; and August 
did as he did every night pretty nearly— 
looked up at the stove and told them what 
he imagined of the many adventures and 
joys and sorrows of the human being who 
figured on the panels from his cradle to 
his grave. 

To the children the stove was a house- 
hold god. In summer they laid a mat of 


fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up 
22 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 23 


with green boughs and the numberless 
beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol coun- 
try. In winter all their joys centered in 
it, and, scampering home from school over 
the ice and snow, they were happy, know- 
ing that they would soon be cracking nuts 
or roasting chestnuts in the broad ardent 
glow of its noble tower, which rose eight 
feet high above them with all its spires 
and pinnacles and crowns. 

Once a traveling peddler had told them 
that the letters on it meant Augustin 
Hirschvogel, and that Hirschvogel had 
been a great German potter and painter, 
like his father before him, in the art-sanc- 
tified city of Nirnberg, and had made 
many such stoves, which were all miracles 
of beauty and workmanship, putting all 
his heart and soul and faith into his labors, 
as the men of those earlier ages did, and 
thinking but little of gold or praise. 

An old trader, too, who sold curiosities 
not far from the church had told August 
a little more about the brave family of 


24 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen in 
Niirnberg to this day; of old Veit, the first 
of them, who painted the Gothic windows 
of St. Sebald with the marriage of the 
Margravine; of his sons and of his grand- 
sons, potters, painters, engravers all, and 
chief of them great Augustin, the Luca 
della Robbia of the North. And August’s 
imagination, always quick, had made a 
living personage out of these few records, 
and saw Hirschvogel as though he were 
in the flesh walking up and down the Max- 
imilian Strasse on his visit to Innspruck, 
and maturing beautiful things in his brain 
as he stood on the bridge and gazed on the 
emerald-green flood of the Inn. 

So the stove had got to be called 
Hirschvogel in the family, as if it were a 
living creature, and little August was 
very proud because he had been named 
after that famous old dead German who 
had had the genius to make so glorious 
a thing. All the children loved the stove, 
‘but with August the love of it was a pas- 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 25 


sion; and in his secret heart he used to say 
to himself, ““When I am a man, I will 
make just such things too, and then I will 
set Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a 
house that I will build myself in Inn- 
spruck just outside the gates, where the 
chestnuts are, by the river; that is what I 
will do when I am a man.” 

For August, a salt-baker’s son and a 
little cow-keeper when he was anything, 
was a dreamer of dreams, and when he 
was upon the high Alps with his cattle, 
with the stillness and the sky around him, 
was quite certain that he would live for 
greater things than driving the herds up 
when the springtide came amid the blue 
sea of gentians, or toiling down in the 
town with wood and timber as his father 
and grandfather did every day of their 
lives. He was a strong and healthy little 
fellow, fed on the free mountain air, and 
he was very happy, and loved his family 
devotedly, and was as active as a squirrel 
and playful as a hare; but he kept his 


26 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


thoughts to himself, and some of them 
went a very long way for a little boy who 
was only one among many, and to whom 
nobody had ever paid any attention ex- 
cept to teach him his letters and tell him 
to fear God. August in winter was only 
a little, hungry schoolboy, trotting to be 
catechized by the priest, or to bring the 
loaves from the bakehouse, or to carry his 
father’s boots to the cobbler; and in sum- 
mer he was only one of hundreds of boys 
who herded cows, driving the poor, half- 
blind, blinking, stumbling cattle, ringing 
their throat bells, out into the sweet intox- 
ication of the sudden sunlight, and lived 
with them up in the heights among the 
Alpine roses, with only the clouds and the 
‘snow summits near. But he was always 
thinking, thinking, thinking, for all that; 
and under his little sheepskin winter coat 
and his rough hempen summer shirt his 
heart had as much courage in it as Hofer’s 
ever had—great Hofer, who is a household 
word in all the Innthal, and whom August 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 27 


always reverently remembered when he 
went to the city of Innspruck and ran out 
by the foaming water mill and under the 
wooded height of Berg Isel. 

August lay now in the warmth of the 
stove and told the children stories, his own 
little brown face growing red with excite- 
ment as his imagination glowed to fever 
heat. ‘That human being on the panels, 
who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, 
as a boy playing among flowers, as a lover 
sighing under a casement, as a soldier in 
the midst of strife, as a father with chil- 
dren round him, as a weary, old, blind man 
on crutches, and, lastly, as a ransomed 
soul raised up by angels, had always had 
the most intense interest for August, and 
he had made, not one history for him, but 
a thousand; he seldom told them the same 
tale twice. He had never seen a storybook 
in his life; his primer and his mass book 
were all the volumes he had. But nature 
had given him Fancy, and she is a good 
fairy that makes up for the want of very 


28 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


many things! only, alas! her wings are so 
very soon broken, poor thing, and then she 
is of no use at all. 

“Tt is time for you all to go to bed, chil- 
dren,” said Dorothea, looking up from her 
spinning. “Father is very late to-night; 
you must not sit up for him.” 

“Oh, five minutes more, dear Dor- 
othea!’”’ they pleaded; and little rosy and 
golden Ermengilda climbed up into her 
lap. “‘Hurschvogel is so warm; the beds 
are never so warm as he is. Can’t you tell 
us another tale, August?” 

“No,” cried August, whose face had lost 
its light, now that his story had come to 
an end, and who sat serious, with his hands 
clasped on his knees, gazing at the lumi- 
nous arabesques of the stove. 

“It is only a week to Christmas,” he 
said, suddenly. 

“Grandmother’s big cakes!’ chuckled 
little Christof, who was five years old, and 
thought Christmas meant a big cake and 
nothing else. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 29 


“What will Santa Claus find for ’Gilda 
if she is good?” murmured Dorothea over 
the child’s sunny head; for, however hard 
poverty might pinch, it could never pinch 
so tightly that Dorothea would not find 
some wooden toy and some rosy apples to 
put in her little sister’s socks. 

“Father Max has promised me a big 
goose, because I saved the calf’s life in 
June,’ said August; it was the twentieth 
time he had told them so that month, he 
was so proud of it. 

“And Aunt Maila will be sure to send 
us wine and honey and a barrel of flour; 
she always does,” said Albrecht. Their 
Aunt Maila had a chalet and a little farm 
over on the green slopes towards Dorp 
Ampas. 

“T shall go up into the woods and get 
Hirschvogel’s crown,” said August; they 
always crowned Hirschvogel for Christ- 
mas with pine boughs and ivy and moun- 
tain-berries. ‘The heat soon withered the 
crown; but it was part of the religion of 


30 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


the day to them, as much so as it was to 
cross themselves in church and raise their © 
voices in the “O Salutaris Hostia.” 

And they fell to chatting of all they 
would do on the Christ-night, and one lit- 
tle voice piped loud against another’s, and 
they were as happy as though their stock- 
ings would be full of golden purses and 
jeweled toys, and the big goose in the soup 
pot seemed to them such a meal as kings 
would envy. 


ees 


ae 


IV 


In the midst of their chatter and laugh- 
ter a blast of frozen air and a spray of 
driven snow struck like ice through the 
room, and reached them even in the 
warmth of the old wolfskins and the great 
stove. It was the door which had opened 
and let in the cold; it was their father who 
had come home. 

The younger children, joyous, ran to 
meet him. Dorothea pushed the one 
wooden armchair of the room to the stove, 


and August flew to set the jug of beer on 
31 


32 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


a little round table, and to fill a long clay 
pipe; for their father was good to them all, 
and seldom raised his voice in anger, and 
they had been trained by the mother they 
had loved to dutifulness and obedience and 
a watchful affection. 

To-night Karl Strehla responded very 
wearily to the young ones’ welcome, and 
came to the wooden chair with a tired step 
and sat down heavily, not noticing either 
pipe or beer. 

“Are you not well, dear father?” his 
daughter asked him. 

“I am well enough,” he answered, dully, 
and sat there with his head bent, letting 
the lighted pipe grow cold. 3 

He was a fair, tall man, gray before his 
time, and bowed with labor. 

“Take the children to bed,” he said sud- 
denly, at last, and Dorothea obeyed. Au- 
gust stayed behind, curled before the 
stove; at the age of nine, and when one 
earns money in the summer from the 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 33 


farmers, one is not altogether a child any 
more, at least in one’s own estimation. 

August did not heed his father’s silence: 
he was used toit. Karl Strehla was a man 
of few words, and, not being very healthy, 
was usually too tired at the end of the 
day to do more than drink his beer and 
sleep. August lay on the wolfskin, dreamy 
and comfortable, looking up through his 
drooping eyelids at the golden coronets on 
the crest of the great stove, and wondering 
for the millionth time whom it had been 
made for, and what grand places and 
scenes it had known. 

Dorothea came down from putting the 
little ones in their beds; the cuckoo clock 
in the corner struck eight; she looked at 
her father and the untouched pipe, then 
sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. 
She thought he had been drinking in some 
tavern; it had often been so with him of 
late. 

There was a long silence; the cuckoo 


84 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


called the quarter twice; August dropped 
off to sleep, his curls falling over his face; 
Dorothea’s wheel hummed like a cat. 

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand 
on the table, sending the pipe on the 
ground. 

“T have sold Hirschvogel,” he said; and 
his voice was husky and ashamed in his 
throat. The spinning wheel stopped. 
August sprang erect out of his sleep. 

“Sold Hirschvogel!’ If their father 
had dashed the holy crucifix on the floor at 
their feet and spat on it, they could not 
have shuddered under the horror of a 
greater blasphemy. | 

“I have sold Hirschvogel,” said Karl 
Strehla, in the same husky, dogged voice. 
“T have sold it to a traveling trader in such 
things for two hundred florins. What 
would you have me do?—I owe double 
that. He saw it this morning when you 
were all out. He will pack it and take it 
to Munich to-morrow.” 

Dorothea gave a low, shrill ery: 


eC, UL 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 35 


“Oh, father!—the children—in mid- 
winter !”’ 

She turned white as the snow without; 
her words died away in her throat. 

August stood, half blind with sleep, 
staring with dazed eyes as his cattle stared 
at the sun when they came out from their 
winter’s prison. 

“It isn’t true! It isn’t true!” he mut- 
tered. “Are you joking, father?” 

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh. 

“Tt is true. Would you like to know 
what is true too/—that the bread you eat, 
and the meat you put in this pot, and the 
roof you have over your heads, are none of 
them paid for, have been none of them 
paid for for months and months; if it had 
not been for your grandfather I should 
have been in prison all summer and au- 
tumn, and he is out of patience and will do 
no more now. There is no work to be had: 
the masters go to younger men: they say 
I work poorly; it may be so. Who can 
keep his head above water with ten hungry 


36 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


children dragging him down? When your 
mother lived, it was different. Boy, you 
stare at me as if I were amad dog! You 
have made a god of that china thing. 
Well, it goes—goes to-morrow. ‘Two hun- 
dred florins, that is something. It will 
keep me out of prison for a while, and 
with the spring things may change _ 

August stood like a creature paralyzed. 
His eyes were wide open, fastened on his 
father’s with terror and incredulous hor- 
ror; his face had grown as white as his 
sister’s; his chest heaved with tearless sobs. 

“Tt isn’t true! Itisn’t true!” he echoed, 
stupidly. It seemed to him that the very 
skies must fall, and the earth perish, if 
they could take away Hirschvogel. They 
might as soon talk of tearing down God’s 
sun out of the heavens. 

“You will find it true,” said his father, 
doggedly, and angered because he was in 
his own soul bitterly ashamed to have bar- 
tered away the heirloom and treasure of 
his race and the comfort and health-giver 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 37 


of his young children. “You will find it 
true. ‘The dealer has paid me half the 
money to-night, and will pay me the other 
half to-morrow when he packs it up and 
takes it away to Munich. No doubt it is 
worth a great deal more—at least I sup- 
pose so, since he gives that—but beggars 
can't be choosers. The little black stove in 
the kitchen will warm you all just as well. 
Who would keep a gilded, painted thing 
in a poor house like this, when one can 
make two hundred florins by it? Dor- 
othea, you never sobbed more when your 
mother died. What is it, when all is said? 
A bit of hardware much too grand-looking 
for such a room as this. If all the Strehlas 
had not been born fools it would have been 
sold a century ago, when it was dug up 
out of the ground. ‘It is a stove for a 
museum, the trader said when he saw it. 
To a museum let it go.” 

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s 
when it is caught for its death, and threw 
himself on his knees at his father’s feet. 


38 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“Oh, father, father!’ he cried, convul- 
sively, his hands closing on Strehla’s knees, 
and his uplifted face blanched and dis- 
torted with terror. “Oh, father, dear 
father, you can’t mean what. you say! 
Send it away—our life, our sun, our joy, 
our comfort? We shall all die in the dark 
and cold. Sell me rather. Sell me to any 
trade or any pain you like; I won’t mind. 
But Hirschvogel!—it is like selling the 
very cross off the altar! You must be 
joking. You could not do such a thing 
—you could not!—you who have always 
been gentle and good, and who have sat 
in the warmth here year after year with 
our mother. It is not a piece of hardware, 
as you say; it is a living thing, for a great 
man’s thoughts and fancies have put life 
into it, and it loves us though we are only 
poor little children, and we love it with all 
our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I 
am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows! Oh, 
listen; I will go and try to get work to- 
morrow! I will ask them to let me cut 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 39 


ice or make the paths through the snow. 
There must be something I could do, and 
I will beg the people we owe money to to 
wait; they are all neighbors—they will be 
patient. But sell Hirschvogel !—oh, never! 
never! never! Give the florins back to the 
vileman. ‘Tell him it would be like selling 
the shroud out of mother’s coffin, or the 
golden curls off Ermengilda’s head! Oh, 
father, dear father! do hear me, for pity’s 
sake!” 

Strehla was moved by the boy’s anguish. 
He loved his children, though he was often 
weary of them, and their pain was pain to 
him. But besides emotion, and stronger 
than emotion, was the anger that August 
roused in him: he hated and despised him- 
self for the barter of the heirloom of his 
race, and every word of the child stung 
him with a stinging sense of shame. 

And he spoke in his wrath rather than 
in his sorrow. 

“You are a little fool,” he said, harshly, 
as they had never heard him speak. “You 


40 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to 
bed. The stove is sold. There is no more 
to be said. Children like you have nothing 
to do with such matters. The stove is sold, 
and goes to Munich to-morrow. What is 
it to you? Be thankful I can get bread 
for you. Get on your legs, I say, and go 
to bed.” 

Strehla took up the jug of ale as he 
paused, and drained it slowly as a man 
who had no cares. 3 

August sprang to his feet and threw his 
hair back off his face; the blood rushed 
into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his 
great soft eyes flamed alight with furious 
passion. 

“You dare not!” he eried aloud. “You 
dare not sell it, I say! It is not yours 
alone; it is ours x: 

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the 
bricks with a force that shivered it to 
atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his 
son a blow that felled him to the floor. It 
was the first time in all his life that he had 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 41 


ever raised his hand against any one of his 
children. ; 

Then he took the oil lamp that stood at 
his elbow and stumbled off to his own 
chamber with a cloud before his eyes. 

“What has happened?’ said August, a 
little while later, as he opened his eyes and 
saw Dorothea weeping above him on the 
wolfskin before the stove. He had been 
struck backward, and his head had fallen 
on the hard bricks where the wolfskin did 
not reach. He sat up a moment, with his 
face bent upon his hands. 

“I remember now,” he said, very low, 
under his breath. 

Dorothea showered kisses on him, while 
her tears fell like rain. 

“But, oh, dear, how could you speak so 
to father?” she murmured. “It was very 
wrong.” 

“No, I was right,” said August, and 
his little mouth, which hitherto had only 
curled in laughter, curved downward with 
a fixed and bitter seriousness. “How dare 


42 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


he? How dare he?” he muttered, with his 
head sunk in his hands. “It is not his 
alone. It belongs to us all. It is as much 
yours and mine as it is his.” 

Dorothea could only sob in answer. She 
was too frightened to speak. ‘The author- 
ity of their parents in the house had never 
in her remembrance been questioned. 

“Are you hurt by the fall, dear Au- 
gust?” she murmured, at length, for he 
looked to her so pale and strange. 

“Yes—no. I don’t know. What does 
it matter?’ 

He sat up upon the wolfskin with pas- 
sionate pain upon his face; all his soul 
was in rebellion, and he was only a child 
and powerless. 

“It’s a sin; it’s a theft; it’s an infamy,” 
he said, slowly, his eyes fastened on the 
gilded feet of Hirschvogel. 

“Oh, August, do not say such things of 
father!” sobbed his sister. “Whatever he 
does, we ought to think it right.” 

August laughed aloud. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE A3 


“Is it right that he should spend his 
money in drink ?—that he should let orders 
lie unexecuted?—that he should do his 
work so poorly that no one cares to em- 
ploy him?—that he should live on grand- 
father’s charity, and then dare sell a thing 
that is ours every whit as much as it is 
his? 'To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! 
I would sooner sell my soul!” 

“August!” cried Dorothea, with piteous 
entreaty. He terrified her; she could not 
recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in 
those fierce and blasphemous words. 

August laughed aloud again; then all 
at once his laughter broke down into bit- 
terest weeping. He threw himself for- 
ward on the stove, covering it with kisses, 
and sobbing as though his heart would 
burst from his bosom. 

What could he do? Nothing, nothing, 
nothing! 

“August, dear August,” whispered 
Dorothea, piteously, and trembling all 
over—for she was a very gentle girl, and 


44 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


fierce feeling terrified her—“August, do 
not lie there. Come to bed: it is quite 
late. In the morning you will be calmer. 
It is horrible indeed, and we shall die of 
cold, at least the little ones; but if it is 
father’s will " 

“Let me alone,” said August, through 
his teeth, striving to still the storm of sobs 
that shook him from head to foot. “Let 
me alone. Inthe morning! How can you 
speak of the morning?” 

“Come to bed, dear,” sighed his sister. 
“Oh, August, do not lie and look like 
that! you frighten me. Do come to bed.” 

“IT shall stay here.” 

“Here! All night!” 

“They might take it in the night. Be- 
sides, to leave it now!” 

“But it is cold! The fire is out.” 

“It will never be warm any more, nor 
shall we.” 

All his childhood had gone out of him; 
all his gleeful, careless, sunny temper had 
gone with it. He spoke sullenly and 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 45 


wearily, choking down the great sobs in 
his chest. ‘To him it was as if the end of 
the world had come. 

His sister lingered by him while striv- 
ing to persuade him to go to his place in 
the little crowded bedchamber with Al- 
brecht and Waldo and Christof. But it 
was in vain. “I shall stay here,” was all 
he answered her. And he stayed—all 
the night long. 


| 


'f 
! Nite | 


ey nh 
il rafal * a: 


—=— 


(SL 
pul 


{ 


Ss 
> 


rysT ; 


7 


Mill 


flee 
(inasanestennae ft 
Sadan ae 


THE lamps went out; the rats came and 
ran across the floor; as the hours crept on 
through midnight and past, the cold be- 
came intense and the air of the room 
grew like ice. August did not move; he 
lay with his face downward on the golden 
and rainbow-hued pedestal of the house- 
hold treasure, which henceforth was to 
be cold forevermore, an exiled thing in a 
foreign city in a far-off land. 

While it was yet dark his three elder 


brothers came down the stairs and let 
46 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 47 


themselves out, each bearing his lantern 
and going to his work in stoneyard and 
timberyard and at the salt works. They 
did not notice him; they did not know 
what had happened. 

A little later his sister came down with 
a light in her hand to make ready the 
house ere morning should break. 

She stole up to him and laid her hand 
on his shoulder timidly. 

“Dear August, you must be frozen. 
August, do look up! do speak!” 

August raised his eyes with a wild, 
feverish, sullen look in them that she had 
never seen there. His face was ashen 
white; his lips were like fire. He had 
not slept all night; but his passionate 
sobs had given way to delirious waking 
dreams and numb senseless _trances, 
which had alternated one on another 
all through the freezing, lonely, horrible 
hours. 

“Tt will never be warm again,” he 
muttered, “never again!” 


48 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


Dorothea clasped him with trembling 
hands. 

“August! do you not know me?” she 
cried, in an agony. “I am Dorothea. 
Wake up, dear—wake up! It is morning, 
only so dark!” 

August shuddered all over. 

“The morning?’ he echoed. 

He slowly rose to his feet. 

“TI will go to grandfather,” he said, very 
low. “He is always good: perhaps he 
could save it.”’ 3 

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker 
of the house door drowned his words. A 
strange voice called aloud through the 
keyhole: 

“Let mein! Quick—there is no time to 
lose! More snow like this, and the roads 
will all be blocked. Let me in! Do you 
hear? I have come to take the great 
stove.” 

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, 
his eyes blazing. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 49 


“You shall never touch it!’ he 
screamed; “‘you shall never touch it!” 

“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big 
man, who was a Bavarian, amused at the 
fierce little figure fronting him. 

“1! said August. “You shall never 
have it! you shall kill me first!’ 

“Strehla,” said the big man, as August’s 
father entered the room, “you have a little 
mad dog here: muzzle him.” 

One way and another they did muzzle 
him. He fought like a little demon, and 
hit out right and left, and one of his blows 
gave the Bavarian a black eye. But he 
was soon mastered by four grown men, 
and his father flung him with no light 
hand out from the door of the back 
entrance, and the buyers of the stately 
and beautiful stove set to work to pack it 
carefully and carry it away. 

When Dorothea stole out to look for 
August, he was nowhere in sight. She 
went back to little Gilda, who was ailing, 


50 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


and sobbed over the child, while the others 
stood looking on, dimly understanding 
that with Hirschvogel was going all the 
warmth of their bodies, all the hight of 
their hearth. 

Even their father now was sorry and 
ashamed; but two hundred florins seemed 
a big sum to him, and, after all, he thought 
the children could warm themselves quite 
as well at the black iron stove in the 
kitchen. Besides, whether he regretted it 
now or not, the work of the Niirnberg 
potter was sold irrevocably, and he had 
to stand still and see the men from Munich 
wrap it in manifold wrappings and bear it 
out into the snowy air to where an oxcart 
stood in waiting for it. 

In another moment Hirschvogel was 
gone—gone forever. 

August had stood still for a time, lean- 
ing, sick and faint from the violence that 
had been done him, against the back wall 
of the house. The wall looked on a court 
where a well was, and the backs of other 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 53 


houses, and beyond them the spire of the 
Muntze Tower and the peaks of the 
mountains. 

Into the court an old neighbor hobbled 
for water, and, seeing the boy, said to him: 

“Child, is it true that your father is 
selling the big painted stove?’ 

August nodded his head, then burst into 
a passion of tears. 

“Well, he surely is a fool,’ said the 
neighbor. “Heaven forgiveme for calling 
him that before his own child! but the 
stove was worth a mint of money. I re- 
member in my young days, in old Anton’s 
time (that was your great-grandfather, 
my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw it, 
and said it was worth its weight in gold.” 

August’s sobs went on their broken, im- 
petuous course. 

“I loved it! I loved it!’ he moaned. 
“T don’t care what its value was. I loved 
it! I loved it!” 

“You little simpleton!” said the old 
man, kindly. “But you are wiser than 


54 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


your father, when all’s said. If sell it he 
‘must, he should have taken it to good 
Herr Steiner over at Spriiz, who would 
have given him honest value. But no 
doubt they took him over his beer—aye, 
aye! but if I were you I would do better 
than cry. I would go after it.” 

August raised his head, the tears rain- 
ing down his cheeks. 

“Go after it when you are bigger,” said 
the neighbor, with a good-natured wish to 
cheer him up a little. “The world is a 
small thing after all: I was a traveling 
clockmaker once upon a time, and I know 
that your stove will be safe enough who- 
ever gets it; anything that can be sold for 
a round sum is always wrapped up in 
cotton wool by everybody. Aye, aye, 
don’t cry so much; you will see your stove 
again some day.” 

Then the old man hobbled away to draw 
his wooden pail full of water at the well. 

August remained leaning against the 
wall; his head was buzzing and his heart 


THE NEIGHBOR. 


% hot a 
wal’, 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 57 


fluttering with the new idea that had 
presented itself to his mind. “Go after 
it,” had said the old man. He thought, 
“Why not go with it?’ He loved it better 
than anyone else, even better than Doro- 
thea; and he shrank from the thought of 
meeting his father again, his father who 
had sold Hirschvogel. 

He was by this time in that state of 
exaltation in which the impossible looks 
quite natural and commonplace. His 
tears were still wet on his pale cheeks, but 
they had ceased to fall. He ran out of 
the courtyard by a little gate, and across 
to the huge Gothic porch of the church. 
From there he could watch unseen his 
father’s house door, at which were always 
hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, 
such as are common and so picturesque in 
Austria, for a part of the house was let 
to a man who dealt in pottery. 

He hid himself in the grand portico, 
which he had so often passed through to 
go to mass or compline within, and 


58 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


presently his heart gave a great leap, for 
he saw the straw-inwrapped stove brought 
out and laid with infinite care on the bull- 
ock dray. ‘Two of the Bavarian men 
mounted beside it, and the sleigh wagon 
slowly crept over the snow of the place— 
snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble 
old minster looked its grandest and most 
solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its 
vast archways, and its porch that was it- 
self as big as many a church, and its 
strange gargoyles and lamp irons black 
against the snow on its roof and on the 
pavement; but for once August had no 
eyes for it: he only watched for his old 
friend. ‘Then he, a little, unnoticeable 
enough figure, like a score of other boys 
in Hall, crept, unseen by any of his 
brothers or sisters, out of the porch and 
over the shelving uneven square, and fol- 
lowed in the wake of the dray. 

Its course lay towards the station of the 
railway, which is close to the salt works, 
whose smoke at times sullies this part of 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 59 


clean little Hall, though it does not do 
very much damage. From Hall the iron 
road runs northward through glorious 
country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, 
Buda, and southward over the Brenner 
into Italy. Was Hirschvogel going north 
or south? This at least he would soon 
know. 


VI 


Aveust had often hung about the little 
station, watching the trains come and go 
and dive into the heart of the hills and 
vanish. No one said anything to him for 
idling about; people are kind-hearted and 
easy of temper in this pleasant land, and 
children and dogs are both happy there. 
He heard the Bavarians arguing and 
vociferating a great deal, and learned that 
they meant to go too and wanted to go 
with the great stove itself. But this they 
could not do, for neither could the stove go 


by a passenger train nor could they them- 
60 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 61 


selves go in a goods train. So at length 
they insured their precious burden for a 
large sum, and consented to send it by a 
luggage train which was to pass through 
Hall in half an hour. The swift trains sel- 
dom deign to notice the existence of Hall 
at all. 

August heard, and a desperate resolve 
formed itself in his little mind. Where 
Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave 
one terrible thought to Dorothea—poor, 
gentle Dorothea!—sitting in the cold at 
home, then set to work to execute his 
project. How he managed it he never 
knew very clearly himself, but certain it 
is that when the goods train from the 
north, which had come all the way from 
Linz on the Danube, moved out of Hall, 
August was hidden behind the stove in 
the great covered truck, and wedged, un- 
seen and undreamt of by any human 
creature, amidst the cases of wood-carv- 
ing, of clocks and clockwork, of Vienna 
toys, of Turkish carpets, of Russian skins, 


62 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


of Hungarian wines, which shared the 
same abode as did his swathed and bound 
Hirschvogel. No doubt he was very 
naughty, but it never occurred to him that 
he was so: his whole mind and soul were 
absorbed in the one entrancing idea, to 
follow his beloved friend and fire-king. 

It was very dark in the closed truck, 
which had only a little window above the 
door; and it was crowded, and had a 
strong smell in it from the Russian hides 
and the hams that were init. But August 
was not frightened; he was close to 
Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be 
closer still; for he meant to do nothing less 
than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being — 
a shrewd little boy, and having had by 
great luck two silver groschen in his 
breeches-pocket, which he had earned the 
day before by chopping wood, he had 
bought some bread and sausage at the 
station of a woman there who knew him, 
and who thought he was going out to his 
Uncle Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 63 


This he had with him, and this he ate in 
the darkness and amid the lumbering, 
pounding, thundering noise which made 
him giddy, as he had never been in a train 
of any kind before. Still he ate, having 
had no breakfast, and being a child, and 
half a German, and not knowing at all 
how or when he ever would eat again. 
When he had eaten, not so much as he 
wanted, but as much as he thought was 
prudent (for who could say when he 
would be able to buy anything more?), he 
set to work like a little mouse to make a 
hole in the withes of straw and hay which 
enveloped the stove. If it had been put 
into a packing case he would have been 
defeated at the outset. As it was, he 
gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, and 
pushed, just as a mouse would have done, 
making his hole where he guessed that the 
opening of the stove was—the opening 
through which he had so often thrust the 
big oak logs to feed it. No one disturbed 
him; the heavy train went lumbering on 


64 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


and on, and he saw nothing at all of the 
beautiful mountains, and shining waters, 
and great forests through which he was 
being carried. He was hard at work 
getting through the straw and hay and 
twisted ropes; and get through them at 
last he did, and found the door of the stove, 
which he knew so well, and which was quite 
large enough for a child of his age to slip 
through, and it was this which he had 
counted upon doing. Slip through he did, 
as he had often done at home for fun, and 
curled himself up to see whether he could 
remain there many hours. He found that 
he could; air came in through the brass 
fretwork of the stove; and with admirable 
caution in such a little fellow he leaned 
out, drew the hay and straw together, and 
rearranged the ropes, so that no one could 
ever have dreamed a little mouse had been 
at them. ‘Then he curled himself up 
again, this time more like a dormouse than 
anything else; and, being safe inside his 
dear Hirschvogel and intensely cold, he 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 65 


went fast asleep as if he were in his own 
bed at home with Albrecht and Christof 
on either side of him. The train lumbered 
on, stopping often and long, as is the habit 
of goods trains, sweeping the snow away 
with its cow-switcher, and rumbling 
through the deep heart of the mountains, 
with its lamps aglow like the eyes of a 
dog in a night of frost. 

The train rolled on in its heavy, slow 
fashion, and the child slept soundly for a 
long while. When he did wake, it was 
quite dark outside in the land; he could 
not see, and of course he was in absolute 
darkness; and for a while he was sorely 
frightened, and trembled terribly, and 
sobbed in a quiet, heartbroken fashion, 
thinking of them all at home. Poor 
Dorothea! How anxious she would be! 
How she would run over the town and 
walk up to grandfather’s at Dorf Ampas, 
and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, 
thinking he had taken refuge with Uncle 
Joachim! His conscience smote him for 


66 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


the sorrow he must be even then causing 
to his gentle sister; but it never occurred 
to him to try to go back. If he once 
were to lose sight of Hirschvogel, how 
could he ever hope to find it again? How 
could he ever know whither it had gone— 
north, south, east, or west? The old neigh- 
bor had said that the world was small; but 
August knew at least that it must have a 
great many places in it: that he had seen 
himself on the maps on his schoolhouse 
walls. Almost any other little boy would, 
I think, have been frightened out of his 
wits at the position in which he found him- 
self; but August was brave, and he had 
a firm belief that God and Hirschvogel 
would take care of him. The master 
potter of Nurnberg was always present 
to his mind, a kindly, benign, and gracious 
spirit, dwelling manifestly in that porce- 
lain tower whereof he had been the maker. 
A droll fancy, you say? But every child 
with a soul in him has quite as quaint 
fancies as was this one of August’s. 


a i alt cacti 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 67 


So he got over his terror and his sobbing 
both, though he was so utterly in the dark. 
He did not feel cramped at all, because the 
stove was so large, and air he had in 
plenty, as it came through the fretwork 
running round the top. He was hungry 
again, and again nibbled with prudence at 
his loaf and his sausage. He could not at 
all tell the hour. Every time the train 
stopped and he heard the banging, stamp- 
ing, shouting, and jangling of chains that 
went on, his heart seemed to Jump up into 
his mouth. If they should find him out! 
Sometimes porters came and took away 
this case and the other, a sack here, a bale 
there, now a big bag, now a dead chamois. 
Every time the men trampled near him, 
and swore at each other, and banged this 
and that to and fro, he was so frightened 
that his very breath seemed to stop. 
When they came to lift the stove out, 
would they find him? And if they did find 
him, would they kill him? That was what 
he kept thinking of all the way, all through 


68 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


the dark hours, which seemed without end. 
The goods trains are usually very slow, 
and are many days doing what a quick 
train does in a few hours. This one was 
quicker than most, because it was bearing 
goods to the King of Bavaria; still, it took 
all the short winter’s day and the long 
winter’s night and half another day to go 
over ground that the mail trains cover 
in a forenoon. It passed great armored 
Kufstein standing across the beautiful 
and solemn gorge, denying the right of 
way to all the foes of Austria. It passed 
twelve hours later, after lying by in out- 
of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, 
that marks the border of Bavaria. And 
here the Niirnberg stove, with August 
inside it, was carefully lifted out and set 
under a covered way. When it was lifted 
out, the boy had hard work to keep in his 
screams; he was tossed to and fro as the 
men lifted the huge thing, and the earthen- 
ware walls of his beloved fire-king were 
not cushions of down. However, though 


ae ee oe 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 69 


they swore and grumbled at the weight of 
it, they never suspected that a living child 
was inside it, and they carried it out onto 
the platform and set it down under the 
roof of the goods shed. There it passed 
the rest of the night and all the next 
morning, and August was all the while 
within it. 


(ANG caM au peas nore h ull ‘ 
Neal aunt dl ws all 
Hie ah rine. = a} i (pas 
clr 4 
! 


Vil 


Tue winds of early winter sweep 
bitterly over Rosenheim, and all the vast 
Bavarian plain was one white sheet of 
snow. If there had not been whole armies 
of men at work always clearing the iron 
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have 
run at all. Happily for August, the thick 
wrappings in which the stove was envel- 
oped and the stoutness of its own make 
screened him from the cold, of which, else, 
he must have died—frozen. He had still 


some of his loaf, and a little—a very little 
70 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 71 


—of his sausage. What he did begin to 
suffer from was thirst; and this frightened 
him almost more than anything else, for 
Dorothea had read aloud to them one night 
a story of the tortures some wrecked men 
had endured because they could not find 
any water but the salt sea. It was many 
hours since he had last taken a drink from 
the wooden spout of their old pump, which 
brought them the sparkling, ice-cold water 
of the hills. 

But, fortunately for him, the stove, 
having been marked and registered as 
“fragile and valuable,” was not treated 
quite like a mere bale of goods, and the 
Rosenheim station master, who knew its 
consignees, resolved to send it on by a 
passenger train that would leave there at 
daybreak. And when this train went out, 
in it, among piles of luggage belonging 
to other travelers, to Vienna, Prague, 
BudaPest, Salzburg, was August, still 
undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole 
in the winter under the grass. Those 


72 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


words, “fragile and valuable,” had made 
the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with 
care. He had begun to get used to his 
prison, and a little used to the incessant 
pounding and jumbling and rattling and 
shaking with which modern travel is 
always accompanied, though modern in- 
vention does deem itself so mightily clever. 
Allin the dark he was, and he was terribly 
thirsty; but he kept feeling the earthen- 
ware sides of the Nurnberg giant and say- 
ing, softly, “Take care of me; oh, take 
care of me, dear Hirschvogel!” 

He did not say, “Take me back’; for, 
now that he was fairly out in the world, he 
wished to see a little of it. He began to 
think that they must have been all over 
the world in all this time that the rolling 
and roaring and hissing and jangling had 
been about his ears; shut up in the dark, 
he began to remember all the tales that 
had been told in Yule round the fire at his 
grandfather’s good house at Dorf, of 
gnomes and elves and_ subterranean 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 73 


terrors, and the Erl King riding on the 
black horse of night, and—and—and he 
began to sob and to tremble again, and this 
time did scream outright. But the steam 
was screaming itself so loudly that no one, 
had there been anyone nigh, would have 
heard him; and in another minute or so the 
train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and 
he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, 
“Munchen! Munchen!” 

Then he knew enough of geography to 
know that he was in the heart of Bavaria. 
He had had an uncle killed in the 
Bayerischenwald by the Bavarian forest 
guards, when in the excitement of hunt- 
ing a black bear he had overpassed the 
limits of the Tyrol frontier. 

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant 
young chamois-hunter who had taught 
him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, 
made the very name of Bavaria a terror 
to August. 

“It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!’ he 
sobbed to the stove; but the stove said 


TA THE NURNBERG STOVE 


nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A 
stove can no more speak without fire than 
a man can see without light. Give it fire, 
and it will sing to you, tell tales to you, 
offer you in return all the sympathy you 
ask. 

“It is Bavaria!” sobbed August; for it 
is always a name of dread augury to the 
Tyrolese, by reason of those bitter strug- 
gles and midnight shots and untimely 
deaths which come from those meetings of 
hunters in the Bayerischenwald. But the 
train stopped; Munich was reached, and 
August, hot and cold by turns, and shak- 
ing like a little aspen leaf, felt himself 
once more carried out on the shoulders of 
men, rolled along on a truck, and finally 
set down, where he knew not, only he knew 
he was thirsty—so thirsty! If only he 
could have reached his hand out and 
scooped up a little snow! 

He thought he had been moved on this 
truck many miles, but in truth the stove 
had been only taken from the railway 


| 
; 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 75 


station to a shop in the Marienplatz. 
Fortunately, the stove was always set up- 
right on its four gilded feet, an injunction 
to that effect having been affixed to its 
written label, and on its gilded feet it stood 
now in the small, dark curiosity-shop of 
one Hans Rhilfer. 

“T shall not unpack it till Anton comes,” 
he heard a man’s voice say; and then he 
heard a key grate in a lock, and by the 
unbroken stillness that ensued he con- 
cluded he was alone, and ventured to peep 
through the straw and hay. What he saw 
was a small square room filled with pots 
and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, 
old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese 
idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all 
the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of 
a bric-d-brac dealer’s. It seemed a won- 
derful place to him; but, oh! was there one 
drop of water in it all? That was his 
single thought; for his tongue was parch- 
ing, and his throat felt on fire, and his 
chest began to be dry and choked as with 


76 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


dust. There was not a drop of water, but 
there was a lattice window grated, and 
beyond the window was a wide stone ledge 
covered with snow. August cast one look 
at the locked door, darted out of his hid- 
ing place, ran and opened the window, 
crammed the snow into his mouth again 
and again, and then flew back into the 
stove, drew the hay and straw over the 
place he entered by, tied the cords, and 
shut the brass door down on himself. He 
had brought some big icicles in with him, 
and by them his thirst was finally, if only 
temporarily, quenched. ‘Then he sat still 
in the bottom of the stove, listening in- 
tently, wide-awake, and once more re- 
covering his natural boldness. 

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping 
his heart and his conscience with a hard 
squeeze now and then; but he thought to 
himself, “If I can take her back Hirsch- 
vogel, then how pleased she will be, and 
how little Gilda will clap her hands!” He 
was not at all selfish in his love for Hirsch- 


THE NURNBERG STOVE fia § 


vogel: he wanted it for them all at home 
quite as much as for himself. There was at 
the bottom of his mind a kind of ache of 
shame that his father—his own father— 
should have stripped their hearth and sold 
their honor thus. 

A robin had been perched upon a stone 
griffin sculptured on a house-eave near. 
August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf 
in his pocket, and had thrown them to the 
little bird sitting so easily on the frozen 
snow. 

In the darkness where he was he now 
heard a little song made faint by the stove 
wall and the window pane that was be- 
tween him and it, but still distinct and ex- 
quisitely sweet. It was the robin, singing 
after feeding on the crumbs. August, as 
he heard, burst into tears. He thought of 
Dorothea, who every morning threw out 
some grain or bread on the snow before 
the church. ‘What use is it going there,” 
she said, “if we forget the sweetest crea- 
tures God has made?” Poor Dorothea! 


78 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


Poor, good, tender, much-burdened little 


soul! He thought of her till his tears 
ran like rain. 

Yet it never once occurred to him to 
dream of going home. Hirschvogel was 
here. 


bee " i 
oe ie ee oe 


VIIt 


PRESENTLY the key turned in the lock 
of the door; he heard heavy footsteps and 
the voice of the man who had said to his 
father, “You have a little mad dog: 
muzzle him.” The voice said, “Aye, aye, 
you have called me a fool many times. 
Now you shall see what I have got for 
two hundred dirty florins. Potztawsend! 
never did you do such a stroke of work.” 


Then the other voice grumbled and 
79 


80 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


swore, and the steps of the two men ap- 
proached more closely, and the heart of 
the child went pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a 
mouse’s does when it is on the top of a 
cheese and hears a housemaid’s broom 
sweeping near. They began to strip the 
stove of its wrappings: that he could tell 
by the noise they made with the hay and 
the straw. Soon they had stripped it 
wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and 
exclamations of wonder and surprise and 
rapture which broke from the man who 
had not seen it before. 

“A right royal thing! A wonderful and 
never-to-be-rivaled thing! Grander than 
the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg! 
Sublime! magnificent! matchless!” 

So the epithets ran on in thick, guttural 
voices, diffusing a smell of lager beer so 
strong as they spoke that it reached 
August crouching in his stronghold. If 
they should open the door of the stove! 
That was his frantic fear. If they should 
open it, it would be all over with him. 


= Ca ao 


‘ } 


NS 


(ea 

\(f bY lon 

Aes) 

1% —]\ 

44) NV \ 

x NK 

M7 
\ Y { 

SS 


“GRANDER THAN THE STOVE OF HOHEN- 
SALZBURG!’ 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 83 


They would drag him out; most likely 
they would kill him, he thought, as his 
mother’s young brother had been killed 
in the Wald. 

The perspiration rolled off his forehead 
in his agony; but he had control enough 
over himself to keep quiet, and after 
standing by the Niirnberg master’s work 
for nigh an hour, praising, marveling, 
expatiating in the lengthy German 
tongue, the men moved off a little distance 
and began talking of sums of money and 
divided profits, of which discourse he could 
make out no meaning. All he could make 
out was that the name of the king—the 
king—the king came up very often in their 
arguments. He fancied at times that they 
quarreled, for they swore lustily and their 
voices rose hoarse and high; but after a 
while they seemed to pacify each other and 
agree on something, and were in great 
glee, and so in these merry spirits came 
and slapped the luminous sides of stately 
Hirschvogel, and shouted to it: 


84 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“Old Mumchance, you have brought us 
rare good luck! To think you were 
smoking in a silly fool of a salt-baker’s 
kitchen all these years!” 

Then inside the stove August Jumped 
up, with flaming cheeks and clenched 
hands, and was almost on the point of 
shouting out to them that they were the 
thieves and should say no evil of his father, 
when he remembered, just in time, that to 
breathe a word or make a sound was to 
bring ruin on himself and sever him for- 
ever from Hirschvogel. So he kept still, 
and the men barred the shutters of the 
little lattice and went out by the door, 
double-locking it after them. He had 
made out from their talk that they were 
going to show Hirschvogel to some great 
person; therefore he kept quite still and 
dared not niove. 

Muffled sounds came to him through 
the shutters from the streets below—the 
rolling of wheels, the clanging of church 
bells, and bursts of that military music 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 85 


which is so seldom silent in the streets of 
Munich. An hour perhaps passed by; 
sounds of steps on the stairs kept him in 
perpetual apprehension. In the intensity 
of his anxiety, he forgot that he was 
hungry and many miles away from cheer- 
ful, Old-World little Hall, lying by the 
clear gray river-water, with the ramparts 
of the mountains all around. 

Presently the door opened again 
sharply. He could hear the two dealers’ 
voices murmuring unctuous words, in 
which “honor,” “gratitude,” and many 
fine, long, noble titles played the chief 
parts. The voice of another person, more 
clear and refined than theirs, answered 
them curtly, and then, close by the Nurn- 
berg stove and the boy’s ear, ejaculated 
a single “Wunderschon!” August almost 
lost his terror for himself in his thrill of 
pride at his beloved Hirschvogel being 
thus admired in the great city. He 
thought the master potter must be glad 
too. 


86 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“Wunderschon!” ejaculated the stran- 
ger a second time, and then examined 
the stove in all its parts, read all its 
mottoes, gazed long on all its devices. 

“It must have been made for the Em- 
peror Maximilian,” he said at last; and 
the poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was 
“hugged up into nothing,” as you children 
say, dreading that every moment he would 
open the stove. And open it truly he did, 
and examined the brasswork of the door; 
but inside it was so dark that crouching 
August passed unnoticed, screwed up into 
a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The 
gentleman shut the door at length, with- 
out having seen anything strange inside 
it; and then he talked long and low with 
the tradesmen, and, as his accent was dif- 
ferent from that which August was used 
to, the child could distinguish little that he 
said, except the name of the king and the 
word “gulden” again and again. After a 
while he went away, one of the dealers 
accompanying him, one of them lingering 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 87 


behind to bar up the shutters. Then this 
one also withdrew again, double-locking 
the door. 

The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself 
and dared to breathe aloud. 

What time was it? 

Late in the day, he thought, for to ac- 
company the stranger they had lighted 
a lamp; he had heard the scratch of the 
match, and through the brass fretwork 
had seen the lines of light. 

He would have to pass the night here, 
that was certain. He and Huirschvogel 
were locked in, but at least they were to- 
gether. If only he could have had some- 
thing to eat! He thought with a pang of 
how at this hour at home they ate the 
sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it 
from Aunt Maila’s farm orchard, and 
sang together, and listened to Dorothea’s 
reading of little tales, and basked in the 
glow and delight that had beamed on them 
from the great Niirnberg fire-king. 

“Oh, poor, poor little Gilda! What is 


88 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


she doing without the dear Hirschvogel?” 
he thought. Poor little "Gilda! she had 
now only the black iron stove of the ugly 
little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father! 
August could not bear to hear the 
dealers blame or laugh at his father, but 
he did feel that it had been so, so cruel to 
sell Hirschvogel. ‘The mere memory of 
all those long winter evenings, when they 
had all closed round it, and roasted chest- 
nuts or crab apples in it, and listened to 
the howling of the wind and the deep 
sound of the church bells, and tried very 
much to make each other believe that the 
wolves still came down from the moun- 
tains into the streets of Hall, and were 
that very minute growling at the house 
door—all this memory coming on him with 
the sound of the city bells, and the knowl- 
edge that night drew near upon him so 
completely, being added to his hunger and 
his fear, so overcame him that he burst out 
crying for the fiftieth time since he had 
been inside the stove, and felt that he 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 89 


would starve to death, and wondered 
dreamily whether Hirschvogel would care. 
Yes, he was sure Hirschvogel would care. 
Had he not decked it all summer long with 
Alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths and 
made it sweet with thyme and honeysuckle 
and great garden-lilies? Had he ever for- 
gotten when Santa Claus came to make it 
its crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it 
all around? 

“Oh, shelter me! save me! take care of 
me!” he prayed to the old fire-king, and 
forgot, poor little man, that he had come 
on this wild-goose chase northward to save 
and take care of Hirschvogel! 

After a time he dropped off to sleep, as 
children can do when they weep, and 
robust little hill-born boys must surely do, 
be they where they may. It was not very 
cold in this lumber room; it was tightly 
shut up, and very full of things, and at the 
back of it were hot pipes of an adjacent 
house, where a great deal of fuel was 
burnt. Moreover, August’s clothes were 


90 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


warm ones, and his blood was young. So 
he was not cold, though Munich is terribly 
cold in the nights of December; and he 
slept on and on—which was a comfort 
to him, for he forgot his woes, and his 
perils, and his hunger, for a time. 


MIDNIGHT was once more chiming from 
all the brazen tongues of the city when he 
awoke, and, all being still around him, 
ventured to put his head out of the brass 
door of the stove to see why such a strange 
bright light was round him. 

It was a very strange and brilliant light 
indeed; and yet, what is perhaps still 
stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, 

91 


92 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


nor did what he saw alarm him either, and 
yet I think it would have done so to you 
or me. For.what he saw was nothing less 
than all the bric-d-brac in motion. 

A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Krues- 
sen, was solemnly dancing a minuet with 
a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock 
was going through a gavotte with a 
spindle-legged ancient chair; a very droll 
porcelain figure of Littenhausen was 
bowing to a very stiff soldier in terre cute 
of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was 
playing itself, and a queer little shrill, 
plaintive music that thought itself merry 
came from a painted spinet covered with 
faded roses; some gilt Spanish leather had 
got up on the wall and laughed; a Dres- 
den mirror was tripping about, crowned 
with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was 
riding along on a griffin; a slim Venetian 
rapier had come to blows with a stout 
Ferrara saber, all over a pale-faced little 
chit of a damsel in white Nymphenburg 
china; and a portly Franconian pitcher 


A VENETIAN RAPIER CAME TO BLOWS WITH A 
FERRARA SABER. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 95 


in grés gris was calling aloud, “Oh, these 
Italians! always at feud!” But nobody 
listened to him at all. A great number of 
little Dresden cups and saucers were all 
skipping and waltzing; the teapots, with 
their broad, round faces, were spinning 
their own lids like teetotums; the high- 
backed gilded chairs were having a game 
of cards together; and a little Saxe poodle, 
with a blue ribbon at its throat, was run- 
ning from one to another, while a yellow 
cat of Cornelis Lachtleven’s rode about 
on a Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489. 
Meanwhile the brilliant light shed on the 
scene came from three silver candelabra, 
though they had no candles set up in them; 
and, what is the greatest miracle of all, 
August looked on at these mad freaks 
and felt no sensation of wonder! He 
only, as he heard the violin and the spinet 
playing, felt an irresistible desire to dance 
too. 

No doubt his face said what he wished; 
for a lovely little lady, all in pink and 


96 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


gold and white, with powdered hair, and 
high-heeled shoes, and all made of the very 
finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped 
up to him, and smiled, and gave him her 
hand, and led him out to a minuet. And 
he danced it perfectly—poor little August 
in his thick, clumsy. shoes, and his thick, 
clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough 
homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolese 
hat! He must have danced it perfectly, 
this dance of kings and queens in days 
when crowns were duly honored, for the 
lovely lady always smiled benignly and 
never scolded him at all, and danced so 
divinely herself to the stately measures the 
spinet was playing that August could not 
take his eyes off her till, their minuet 
ended, she sat down on her own white-and- 
gold bracket. 

“I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale,” 
she said to him, with a benignant smile; 
“and you have got through that minuet 
very fairly.” 

Then he ventured to say to her:— 


fees 


s\ yV rs RPE 

BN Sit eae pee igengenite 

Fi islet 
lan 


Wr 


VY We y— 
| Me SYOMGY 
Fa oe y = 
>——_ (Z| 
4 (y ——— 
~Ll 
ae Ss 
9 or — 
S 


Soa. 
“ae 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 99 


“Madame my princess, could you tell 
me kindly why some of the figures and 
furniture dance and speak, and some lie 
up in a corner like lumber? It does make 
me curious. Is it rude to ask?” 

For it greatly puzzled him why, when 
some of the bric-a-brac was all full of life 
and motion, some was quite still and had 
not a single thrill in it. 

“My dear child,” said the powdered 
lady, “is it possible that you do not know 
the reason? Why, those silent, dull things 
are imitation!” 

This she said with so much decision that 
she evidently considered it a condensed but 
complete answer. 

“Imitation?” repeated August, timidly, 
not understanding. 

“Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrica- 
tions!’ said the princess in pink shoes, 
very vivaciously. “They only pretend to 
be what we are! They never wake up: 
how can they? No imitation ever had any 
soul in it yet.” 


100 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“Oh!” said August, humbly, not even 
sure that he understood entirely yet. He 
looked at Hirschvogel: surely it had a 
royal soul within it: would it not wake up 
and speak? Oh, dear! how he longed to 
hear the voice of his fire-king! And he 
began to forget that he stood by a lady 
who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white 
china, with the year 1746 cut on it, and 
the Meissen mark. 

“What will you be when you are a 
man?” said the little lady, sharply, for 
her black eyes were quick though her red 


lips were smiling. ‘Will you work for 


the Kdénigliche Porcellan-Manufactur, 
like my great dead Kandler?” 

“I have never thought,” said August, 
stammering; “at least—that is—I do wish 
—TI do hope to be a painter, as was Master 
Augustin Hirschvogel at Nurnberg.” 

“Bravo!” said all the real bric-a-brac 
in one breath, and the two Italian rapiers 


left off fighting to cry, “Benone!” For — 
there is not a bit of true bric-d-brac in all — 


a ai 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 101 


Europe that does not know the names of 
the mighty masters. 

August felt quite pleased to have won 
so much applause, and grew as red as the 
lady’s shoes with bashful contentment. 

“IT knew all the Hirschvoégel, from old 
Veit downwards,” said a fat grés de 
Flandre beer jug; “I myself was made at 
Nurnberg.” And he bowed to the great 
stove very politely, taking off his own 
silver hat—I mean lid—with a courtly 
sweep that he could scarcely have learned 
from burgomasters. The stove, however, 
was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for 
what is such heartbreak as a suspicion of 
what we love?) came through the mind of 
August: Was Hirschvogel only imitation? 

“No, no, no, no!” he said to himself, 
stoutly: though Hirschvogel never stirred, 
never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in 
it! After all their happy years together, 
after all the nights of warmth and joy he 
owed it, should he doubt his own friend 
and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had 


102 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


kissed in his babyhood? “No, no, no, no!” 
he said, again, with so much emphasis that 
the Lady of Meissen looked sharply again 
at him. 

“No,” she said, with pretty disdain; 
“no, believe me, they may ‘pretend’ for- 
ever. They can never look like us! 
They imitate even our marks, but never 
can they look like the real thing, never can 
they chasser de race.” 

“How should they?’ said a bronze 
statuette of Vischer’s. “They daub them- 
selves green with verdigris, or sit out in 
the rain to get rusted; but green and rust 
are not patina; only the ages can give 
that!” 


“And my imitations are all in primary ~ 


colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of 
a hostelry’s signboard!” said the Lady of 
Meissen, with a shiver. 


“Well, there is a grés de Flandre over — 


there, who pretends to be a Hans Kraut, 


as I am,” said the jug with the silver hat, — 


pointing with his handle to a jug that lay 


4 
4 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 103 


prone on its side in a corner. “He has 
copied me as exactly as it is given to 
moderns to copy us. He might almost be 
mistaken for me. But yet what a dif- 
ference there is! How crude are his blues! 
how evidently doné over the glaze are his 
black letters! He has tried to give him- 
self my very twist; but what a lamentable 
exaggeration of that playful deviation in 
my lines which in his becomes actual de- 
formity !” 

“And look at that,” said the gilt Cordo- 
van leather, with a contemptuous glance 
at a broad piece of gilded leather spread 
out onatable. “They will sell him cheek 
by jowl with me, and give him my name; 
but look! J am overlaid with pure gold 
beaten thin as a film and laid on me in 
absolute honesty by worthy Diego de las 
Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cor- 
dova in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the 
Most Christian. His gilding is one part 
gold to eleven other parts of brass and 
rubbish, and it has been laid on him with 


104 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


a brush—a brush!—pah! of course he will 
be as black as a crock in a few years’ time, 
whilst I am as bright as when I first was 
made, and, unless I am burnt as my Cor- 
dova burnt its heretics, I shall shine on 
forever.” 

“They carve pear-wood because it is so 
soft, and dye it brown, and call it me!” 
said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle. 

“That is not so painful; it does not 
vulgarize you so much as the cups they 
paint to-day and christen after me!” said 


a Carl Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet — 


gorgeous as a jewel. 


“Nothing can be so annoying as to see — 


common gimcracks aping me!” interposed 
the princess in the pink shoes. 

‘They even steal my motto, though it is 
Scripture,” said a T'rawerkrug of Regens- 
burg in black and white. 

“And my own dots they put on plain 
English china creatures!” sighed the little 
white maid of Nymphenburg. 

‘“‘And they sell hundreds and thousands 


i 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 105 


of common china plates, calling them after 
me, and baking my saints and my legends 
in a muffle of to-day; it is blasphemy!” 
said a stout plate of Gubbio, which in its 
year of birth had seen the face of Maestro 
Giorgio. 

“That is what is so terrible in these 
bric-a-brac places,” said the princess of 
Meissen. “It brings one in contact with 
such low, imitative creatures; one really 
is safe nowhere nowadays unless under 
glass at the Louvre or South Kensing- 
ton.” 

“And they get even there,” sighed the 
grées de Flandre. “A terrible thing hap- 
pened to a dear friend of mine, a terre 
cuite of Blasius (you know the terres 
cuites of Blasius date from 1560). Well, 
he was put under glass in a museum that 
shall be nameless, and he found himself 
set next to his own imitation born and 
baked yesterday at Frankfort, and what 
think you the miserable creature said to 
him, with a grin? ‘Old Pipeclay’—that 


106 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


is what he called my friend—‘the fellow 
that bought me got just as much commis- 
sion on me as the fellow that bought you, 
and that was all that he thought about. 
You know it is only the public money that 
goes!’ And the horrid creature grinned 


again till he actually cracked himself. - 


There is a Providence above all things, 
even museums.” 

“Providence might have interfered be- 
fore, and saved the public money,” said 
the little Meissen lady with the pink shoes. 

“After all, does it matter?” said a 
Dutch jar of Haarlem. “AI the sham- 
ming in the world will not make them us!” 

“One does not like to be vulgarized,” 
said the Lady of Meissen, angrily. 

“My maker, the Krabbetje,* did not 
trouble his head about that,” said the 
Haarlem jar, proudly. “The Krabbetje 
made me for the kitchen, the bright, clean, 
snow-white Dutch kitchen, well-nigh three 


centuries ago, and now I am thought 


* Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 
1610, master potter of Delft and Haarlem. 


ee ee ea a ne. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 107 


worthy the palace; yet I wish I were at 
home; yes, I wish I could see the good 
Dutch vrouw, and the shining canals, and 
the great green meadows dotted with the 
kine.” 

“Ah! if we could all go back to our 
makers!’ sighed the Gubbio plate, think- 
ing of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and 
gracious days of the Renaissance; and 
somehow the words touched the frolicsome 
soul of the dancing jars, the spinning tea- 
pots, the chairs that were playing cards; 
and the violin stopped its merry music 
with a sob, and the spinet sighed, thinking 
of dead hands. 

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for 
a master forever lost; and only the swords 
went on quarreling, and made such a 
clattering noise that the Japanese bonze 
rode at them on his monster and knocked 
them both right over, and they lay straight 
and still, looking foolish, and the little 
Nymphenburg maid, though she was cry- 
ing, smiled and almost laughed. 


108 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


Then from where the great stove stood 
there came a solemn voice. 

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and 
the heart of its little human comrade gave 
a great jump of joy. 


“My friends,” said that clear voice from — 


the turret of Nurnberg faience, “I have 
listened to all you have said. There is 
too much talking among the Mortalities 
whom one of themselves has called the 
Windbags. Let us not be like them. I 
hear among men so much vain speech, so 
much precious breath and precious time 
wasted in empty boasts, foolish anger, 
useless reiteration, blatant argument, 
ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to 
deem speech a curse, laid on man to 
weaken and envenom all his undertakings. 
For over two hundred years I have never 
spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so 
reticent. I only speak now because one 
of you said a beautiful thing that touched 
me. If we all might but go back to our 
makers! Ah, yes! if we might! We were 


i 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 109 


made in days when even men were true 
creatures, and so we, the work of their 
hands, were true too. We, the begotten 
of ancient days, derive all the value in 
us from the fact that our makers wrought 
at us with zeal, with piety, with integrity, 
with faith—not to win fortunes or to glut 
a market, but to do nobly an honest thing 
and create for the honor of the Arts and 
God. I see amidst you a little human 
thing who loves me, and in his own igno- 
rant, childish way loves Art. Now, I want 
him forever to remember this night and 
these words; to remember that we are 
what we are, and precious in the eyes of 
the world, because centuries ago those who 
were of single mind and of pure hand so 
created us, scorning sham and haste ‘and 
counterfeit. Well do I recollect my 
master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a 
wise and blameless life, and wrought in 
loyalty and love, and made his time beauti- 
ful thereby, like one of his own rich, 
many-colored church casements, which 


110 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


told holy tales as the sun streamed 
through them. Ah, yes, my friends, to 
go back to our masters—that would be 
the best that could befall us! But they 
are gone, and even the perishable labors 


of their lives outlive them. For many, 


many years I, once honored of emperors, 
dwelt in a humble house and warmed in 
successive winters three generations of 
cold, hungry little children. When I 
warmed them they forgot that they were 
hungry; they laughed and told tales, and 
slept at last about my feet. Then I knew 
that, humble as had become my lot, it was 
one that my master would have wished for 
me, and I was content. Sometimes a tired 
woman would creep up to me, and smile 
because she was near me, and point out 
my golden crown or my ruddy fruit to a 
baby in her arms. That was better than 
to stand in a great hall of a great city, 
cold and empty, even though wise men 
came to gaze and throngs of fools gaped, 
passing with flattering words. Where I 


ae ae 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 111 


go now I know not; but since I go from 
that humble house where they loved me, 
I shall be sad and alone. ‘They pass so 
soon—those fleeting mortal lives! Only 
we endure—we, the things that the human 
brain creates. We can but bless them a 
little as they glide by; if we have done 
that, we have done what our masters 
wished. Soin us our masters, being dead, 
yet may speak and live.” 

Then the voice sank away in silence, 
and a strange golden light that had shone 
on the great stove faded away; so also the 
light died down in the silver candelabra. 
A soft, pathetic melody stole gently 
through the room. It came from the old, 
old spinet that was covered with the faded 
roses. 

Then that sad, sighing music of a by- 
gone day died too; the clocks of the city 
struck six of the morning; day was rising 
over the Bayerischenwald. August awoke 
with a great start, and found himself lying 
on the bare bricks of the floor of the 


112 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


chamber, and all the bric-a-brac was lying 
quite still all around. The pretty Lady 
of Meissen was motionless on her porce- 
lain bracket, and the little Saxe poodle 
was quiet at her side. 

He rose slowly to his feet. He was 
very cold, but he was not sensible of it, 
nor of the hunger that was gnawing at his 
empty little stomach. He was absorbed 
in the wondrous sight, in the wondrous 
sounds, that he had seen and heard. 


—— 


| ws. le 
«TLL 4 
— (ay 


= | Ne 


Aut was dark around him. Was it still 
midnight or had morning come? Morn- 
ing, surely; for against the barred shutters 
he heard the tiny song of the robin. 

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step 
up the stair. He had but a moment in 
which to scramble back into the interior of 
the great stove, when the door opened and 
the two dealers entered, bringing burning 
candles with them to see their way. 

August was scarcely conscious of dan- 


ger more than he was of cold or hunger. 
113 


114 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


A marvelous sense of courage, of security, 
of happiness, was about him, like strong 
and gentle arms enfolding him and lhift- 


ing him upwards—upwards—upwards! ~ 


Hirschvogel would defend him. 

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring 
the redbreast away, and then tramped 
about in their heavy boots and chattered 
in contented voices, and began to wrap up 
the stove once more in all its straw and 
hay and cordage. 

It never once occurred to them to glance 
inside. Why should they look inside a 
stove that they had bought and were about 
to sell again for all its glorious beauty of 
exterior? 


The child still did not feel afraid. A 


great exaltation had come over him: he 
was like one lifted up by his angels. 
Presently the two traders called up 
their porters, and the stove, carefully 
swathed and wrapped and tended as 
though it were some sick prince going on 
a journey, was borne on the shoulders of 


oe 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 115 


six stout Bavarians down the stairs and 
out of the door into the Marienplatz. 
Even behind all those wrappings August 
felt the icy bite of the intense cold of the 
outer air at dawn of a winter’s day in 
Munich. The men moved the stove with 
exceeding gentleness and care, so that he 
had often been far more roughly shaken in 
his big brothers’ arms than he was in his 
journey now; and though both hunger 
and thirst made themselves felt, being foes 
that will take no denial, he was still in that 
state of nervous exaltation which deadens 
all physical suffering and is at once a 
cordial and an opiate. He had heard 
Hirschvogel speak; that was enough. 
The stout carriers tramped through the 
city, six of them, with the Nirnberg fire 
castle on their brawny shoulders, and went 
right across Munich to the railway station, 
and August in the dark recognized all the 
ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing 
railway noises, and thought, despite his 
courage and excitement, “Will it be a 


116 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


very long journey?” For his stomach had 
at times an odd sinking sensation, and his 
head, sadly, often felt light and swim- 
ming. If it was a very, very long 
journey, he felt half afraid that he would 
be dead or something bad before the end, 
and Hirschvogel would be so lonely—that 
was what he thought most about; not 
much about himself, and not much about 
Dorothea and the house at home. He was 
“high-strung to high emprise,” and could 
not look behind him. 

Whether for a long or a short journey, 
whether for weal or woe, the stove with 
August still within it was once more 
hoisted up into a great van; but this time 
it was not all alone, and the two dealers 
as well as the six porters were all with 
it. 

He in his darkness knew that, for he 
heard their voices. The train glided away 
over the Bavarian plain southward; and 
he heard the men say something of Berg 
and the Wurm-See, but their German was 


a 


Pad 
% 
— 


SS —— ee a ” 


ce ge ee ee ee ee ee 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 117 


strange to him, and he could not make out 
what these names meant. 

The train rolled on, with all its fume 
and fuss, and roar of steam, and stench 
of oil and burning coal. It had to go 
quietly and slowly on account of the snow 
which was falling, and which had fallen 
all night. 

“He might have waited till he came to 
the city,” grumbled one man to another. 
“What weather to stay on at Berg!” 

But who he was that stayed on at Berg, 
August could not make out at all. 

Though the men grumbled about the 
state of the roads and the season, they 
were hilarious and well content, for they 
laughed often, and, when they swore, did 
so good-humoredly, and promised their 
porters fine presents at New-Year; and 
August, like the shrewd little boy he was,’ 
who even in the secluded Innthal had 
learned that money is the chief mover of 
men’s mirth, thought to himself, with a 
terrible pang: 


118 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“They have sold Hirschvogel for some 
great sum. They have sold him already!” 

Then his heart grew faint and sick with- 
in him, for he knew very well that he must 
soon die, shut up without food and water 
thus; and what new owner of the great 
fire palace would ever permit him to dwell 
in it? 

“Never mind; I will die,” thought he; 
“and Hirschvogel will know it.” 

Perhaps you think him a very foolish 
little fellow; but I do not. 

It is always good to be loyal and ready 
to endure to the end. 

It is but an hour and a quarter that the 
train usually takes to pass from Munich 
to the Wurm-See, or Lake of Starnberg; 
but this morning the journey was much 
slower, because the way was encumbered 
with snow. When it did reach Possen- 
hofen and stop, and the Nurnberg stove 
was lifted out once more, August could 
see through the fretwork of the brass door, 


0 OO ee ee 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 119 


as the stove stood upright facing the lake, 
that this Wurm-See was a calm and noble 
piece of water, of great width, with low 
wooded banks and distant mountains, a 
peaceful, serene place, full of rest. 

It was now near ten o’clock. The sun 
had come forth; there was a clear gray 
sky hereabouts; the snow was not falling, 
though it lay white and smooth every- 
where, down to the edge of the water, 
which before long would itself be ice. 

Before he had time to get more than a 
glimpse of the green gliding surface, the 
stove was again lifted up and placed on a 
large boat that was in waiting—one of 
those very long and huge boats which the 
women in these parts use as laundries, 
and the men as timber rafts. The stove, 
with much labor and much expenditure of 
time and care, was hoisted into this, and 
August would have grown sick and giddy 
with the heaving and falling if his big 
brothers had not long accustomed him to 


120 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


such tossing about, so that he was as much 
at ease head, as feet, downward. ‘The 
stove once in it safely with its guardians, 
the big boat moved across the lake to 
Leoni. How a little hamlet on a Bavarian 
lake got that Tuscan-sounding name I 
cannot tell; but Leoni it is. The big boat 
was a long time crossing: the lake here is 
about three miles wide, and these heavy 
barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, 
even though they are towed and tugged 
at from the shore. 

“If we should be too late!’ the two 
dealers muttered to each other, in agita- 
tion and alarm. “He said eleven o'clock.” 

Who was he? thought August; the 
buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel. ‘The 
slow passage across the Wurm-See was 
accomplished at length. The lake was 
placid; there was a sweet calm in the air 
and on the water; there was a great deal 
of snow in the sky, though the sun was 
shining and gave a solemn hush to the 
atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 121 


were going up and down; in the clear 
frosty light the distant mountains of 
Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were 
visible; market people, cloaked and 
furred, went by on the water or on the 
banks; the deep woods of the shores were 
black and gray and brown. Poor August 
could see nothing of a scene that would 
have delighted him; as the stove was now 
set, he could see only the old worm-eaten 
wood of the huge barge. 

Presently they touched the pier at 
Leoni. 

““Now, men, for a stout mile and a half! 
You shall drink your reward at Christmas 
time,” said one of the dealers to his 
porters, who, stout, strong men though 
they were, showed a disposition to 
grumble at their task. Encouraged by 
large promises, they shouldered sullenly 
the Nurnberg stove, grumbling again at 
its preposterous weight, but little dream- 
ing that they carried within it a small, 
panting, trembling boy; for August began 


122 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


to tremble, now that he was about to see 
the future owner of Hirschvogel. 

“If he looks like a good, kind man,” 
he thought, “I will beg him to let me stay 
with it.” 


XI 


THE porters began their toilsome jour- 
ney, and moved off from the village pier. 
He could see nothing, for the brass door 
was over his head, and all that gleamed 
through it was the clear gray sky. He 
had been tilted on to his back, and if he 
had not been a little mountaineer, used 
to hanging head-downwards over cre- 
vasses, and, moreover, seasoned to rough 


treatment by the hunters and guides of 
123 | 


124 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


the hills and the salt-workers in the town, 
he would have been made ill and sick by 
the bruising and shaking and many 
changes of position to which he had been 
subjected. 

The way the men took was a mile and a 
half in length, but the road was heavy 
with snow, and the burden they bore was 
heavier still. The dealers cheered them 
on, swore at them, and praised them in 
one breath; besought them and reiterated 
their splendid promises, for a clock was 
striking eleven, and they had been ordered 
to reach their destination at that hour, 
and, though the air was so cold, the heat- 
drops rolled off their foreheads as they 
walked, they were so frightened at being 
late. But the porters would not budge 
a foot quicker than they chose, and as 
they were not poor four-footed carriers 
their employers dared not thrash them, 
though most willingly would they have 
done so. 

The road seemed exceedingly long to 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 125 


the anxious tradesmen, to the plodding 
porters, to the poor little man inside the 
stove, as he kept sinking and rising, sink- 
ing and rising, with each of their steps. 
Where they were going he had no idea, 
only after a very long time he lost the 
sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his 
face through the brasswork above, and 
felt by their movements beneath him that 
they were mounting steps or stairs. Then 
he heard a great many different voices, 
but he could not understand what was be- 
ing said. He felt that his bearers paused 
some time, then moved on and on again. 
Their feet went so softly that he thought 
they must be moving on carpet, and as he 
felt a warm air come to him he concluded 
that he was in some heated chambers, for 
he was a clever little fellow, and could put 
two and two together, though he was so 
hungry and so thirsty and his empty 
stomach felt so strange. They must have 
gone, he thought, through some very great 
number of rooms, for they walked so long 


126 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


on and on, on and on. At last the stove 
was set down again, and, happily for him, 
set so that his feet were downward. 

What he fancied was that he was in 
some museum, like that which he had seen 
in the city of Innspruck. 

The voices he heard were very low, and 
the steps seemed to go away, far away, 
leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. He 
dared not look out, but he peeped through 
the brasswork, and all he could see was a 
big carved lion’s head in ivory, with a gold 
crown atop. It belonged to a velvet 
fautewl, but he could not see the chair, 
only the ivory lion. 

There was a delicious fragrance in the 
air, a fragrance as of flowers. “Only how 
can it be flowers?” thought August. “It 
is December!’ 

From afar off, as it seemed, there 
came a dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet 
as the spinet’s had been, but so much 
fuller, so much richer, seeming as though 
a chorus of angels were singing all to- 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 137 


gether. August ceased to think of the 
museum: he thought of heaven. “Are we 
gone to the Master?” he thought, remem- 
bering the words of Hirschvogel. 

All was so still around him; there was 
no sound anywhere except the sound of 
the far-off choral music. 

He did not know it, but he was in the 
royal castle of Berg, and the music he 
heard was the music of Wagner, who was 
playing in a distant room some of the 
motifs of “Parsifal.” 

Presently he heard a fresh step near 
him, and he heard a low voice say, close 
behind him, “So!” An exclamation, no 
doubt, he thought, of admiration and 
wonder at the beauty of Hirschvogel. 

Then the same voice said, after a long 
pause, during which, no doubt, as August 
thought, this newcomer was examining all 
the details of the wondrous fire tower, “It 
was well bought; it is exceedingly beau- 
tiful! It is undoubtedly the work of 
Augustin Hirschvogel.” 


128 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


Then the hand of the speaker turned the 
round handle of the brass door, and the 
fainting soul of the poor little prisoner 
within grew sick with fear. 

The handle turned, the door was slowly 
drawn open, someone bent down and 
looked in, and the same voice that he had 
heard in praise of its beauty called aloud, 
in surprise, “What is this in it? A live 
child!’ 

Then August, terrified beyond all self- 
control, and dominated by one master 
passion, sprang out of the body of the 
stove and fell at the feet of the speaker. 

“Oh, let me stay! Pray, mein Herr, let 
me stay!’ he sobbed. “I have come all 
the way with Hirschvogel!”’ 

Some gentlemen’s hands seized him, not 
gently by any means, and their lips 
angrily muttered in his ear, “Little knave, 
peace! be quiet! hold your tongue! It is 
the king!” 

They were about to drag him out of the 
august atmosphere as if he had been some 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 129 


venomous, dangerous beast come there to 
slay, but the voice he had heard speak of 
the stove said, in kindly accents, “Poor 
little child! he is very young. Let him 
go: let him speak to me.” 

The word of a king is law to his 
courtiers; so, sorely against their wish, the 
angry and astonished chamberlains let 
August slide out of their grasp, and he 
stood there in his little rough sheepskin 
coat and his thick mud-covered boots, with 
his curling hair all in a tangle, in the 
midst of the most beautiful chamber he 
had ever dreamed of, and in the presence 
of a young man with a beautiful dark face, 
and eyes full of dreams and fire; and the 
young man said to him: 

“My child, how came you here, hidden 
in this stove? Be not afraid: tell me the 
truth. I am the king.” 

August, in an instinct of homage, cast 
his great battered black hat with the 
tarnished gold tassels down on the floor 
of the room, and folded his little brown 


130 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


hands in supplication. He was too 
intensely in earnest to be in any way 
abashed; he was too much lifted out of 
himself by his love for Hirschvogel to be 
conscious of any awe before any earthly 
majesty. He was only so glad—so glad 
it was the king. Kings were always kind; 
so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords. 

“Oh, dear king!” he said, with trem- 
bling entreaty in his faint little voice, 
““Hirschvogel was ours, and we have loved 
it all our lives; and father sold it. And 
when I saw that it did really go from us, 
then I said to myself I would go with it; 
and I have come all the way inside it. 
And last night it spoke and said beautiful 
things. And I do pray you to let me live 
with it, and I will go out every morning 
and cut wood for it and you, if only you 
will let me stay beside it. No one ever has 
fed it with fuel but me since I grew big 
enough, and it loves me—it does indeed; 
it said so last night; and it said that it 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 131 


had been happier with us than if it were 
in any palace i 

And then his breath failed him, and as 
he lifted his little, eager, pale face to the 
young king’s, great tears were rolling 
down his cheeks. 

Now, the king liked all poetic and un- 
common things, and there was that in the 
child’s face which pleased and touched 
him. He motioned to his gentlemen to 
leave the little boy alone. 

“What is your name?” he asked him. 

“IT am August Strehla. My father is 
Karl Strehla. We live in Hall, in the 
Innthal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so 
long—so long!’ 

His lips quivered with a broken sob. 

“And have you truly traveled inside 
this stove all the way from Tyrol?’ 

“Yes,” said August; “no one thought 
to look inside till you did.” 

The king laughed; then another view of 
the matter occurred to him. 


132 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“Who bought the stove of yea father ?”’ 
he inquired. 

“Traders of Munich,” said August, who 
did not know that he ought not to have 
spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, 
and whose little brain was whirling and 
spinning dizzily round its one central 
idea. 

“What sum did they pay your father, 
do you know?” asked the sovereign. 

“Two hundred florins,” said August, 
with a great sigh of shame. “It was so 
much money, and he is so poor, and there 
are so many of us.” 

The king turned to his gentlemen in 
waiting. “Did these dealers of Munich 
come with the stove?” 

He was answered in the affirmative. 
He desired them to be sought for and 
brought before him. As one of his cham- 
berlains hastened on the errand, the mon- 
arch looked at August with compassion. 

“You are very pale, little fellow. 
When did you eat last?” 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 133 


“I had some bread and sausage with 
me; yesterday afternoon I finished it.” 

“You would like to eat now?” 

“If I might have a little water I would 
be glad; my throat is very dry.” 

The king had water and wine brought 
for him, and cake also; but August, 
though he drank eagerly, could not 
eat anything.. His mind was in too great 
a tumult. 

“May I stay with Hirschvogel?—may 
I stay?” he said, with feverish agitation. 

“Wait a little,’ said the king, and 
asked, abruptly, “What do you wish to 
be when you are a man?” 

“A painter. I wish to be what Hirsch- 
vogel was—I mean the master that made 
my Hairschvogel.” 

“T understand,” said the king. 

Then the two dealers were brought into 
their sovereign’s presence. ‘They were so 
terribly alarmed, not being either so in- 
nocent or so ignorant as August was, that 
they were trembling as though they were 


134 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


being led to the slaughter, and they were 
so utterly astonished too at a child’s hav- 
ing come all the way from Tyrol in the 
stove, as a gentleman of the court had just 
told them this child had done, that they 
could not tell what to say or where to look, 
and presented a very foolish aspect indeed. 

“Did you buy this Ntirnberg stove of 
this little boy’s father for two hundred 
florins?” the king asked them; and his 
voice was no longer soft and kind as it 
had been when addressing the child, but 
very stern. 

“Yes, your majesty,” murmured the 
trembling traders. 

“And how much did the gentleman who 
purchased it for me give you?” 

“Two thousand ducats, your majesty,” 
muttered the dealers, frightened out of 
their wits, and telling the truth in their 
fright. 

The gentleman was not oieseee he was 
a trusted counselor in art matters of the 
king’s, and often made purchases for him. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 135 


The king smiled a little, and said 
nothing. The gentleman had made out 
the price to him as eleven thousand ducats. 

“You will give at once to this’ boy’s 
father the two thousand gold ducats that 
you received, less the two hundred 
Austrian florins that you paid him,” said 
the king to his humiliated and abject 
subjects. “You are great rogues. Be 
thankful you are not more greatly 
punished.” 

He dismissed them by a sign to his 
courtiers, and to one of these entrusted the 
mission of making the dealers of the 
Marienplatz disgorge their ill-gotten 
gains. 

August heard, and felt dazzled, yet 
miserable. Two thousand gold Bavarian 
ducats for his father! Why, his father 
would never need to go any more to the 
salt-baking! And yet, whether for ducats 
or for florins, Hirschvogel was sold just 
the same, and would the king let him 
stay with it?—would he? 


136 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


“Oh, do! oh, please do!’ he murmured, 
joining his little brown weather-stained 
hands, and kneeling down before the 
young monarch, who himself stood ab- 
sorbed in painful thought, for the decep- 
tion so basely practiced on him for the 
greedy sake of gain by a trusted counselor 
was bitter to him. 

He looked down on the child, and as 
he did so smiled once more. 

“Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a 
kind voice; “kneel only to your God. 
Will I let you stay with your Hirsch- 
vogel? Yes, I will; you shall stay at my 
court, and you shall be taught to be a 
painter—in oils or on porcelain, as you 
will, and you must grow up worthily, and 
win all the laurels at our schools of art, 
and if when you are twenty-one years 
old you have done well and bravely, then 
I will give you your Nurnberg stove, or, 
if I am no more living, then those who 
reign after me shall do so. And now go 
away with this gentleman, and be not 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 137 


afraid, and you shall light a fire every 
morning in Hirschvogel, but you will not 
need to go out and cut the wood.” 

Then he smiled and stretched out his 
hand; the courtiers tried to make August 
understand that he ought to bow and 
touch it with his lips, but August could 
not understand that anyhow; he was too 
happy. He threw his two arms about 
the king’s knees, and kissed his feet pas- 
sionately; then he lost all sense of where 
he was, and fainted away from hunger, 
and weariness, and emotion, and wondrous 
joy. 

As the darkness of his swoon closed in 
on him, he heard in his fancy the voice 
from Hirschvogel saying: 

“Let us be worthy of our maker!” 


He is only a student yet, but he is a 
happy student, and promises to be a great 
man. Sometimes he goes back for a few 
days to Hall, where the gold ducats have 
made his father prosperous. In the old 


138 THE NURNBERG STOVE 


room of the house is a large white porce- 
lain stove of Munich, the king’s gift to 
Dorothea and ’Gilda. 

And August never goes home without 
going into the great church and giving 
his thanks to God, who blessed his strange 
winter’s journey in the Nurnberg stove. 
As for his dream in the dealers’ room that 
night, he will never admit that he did 
dream it; he still declares that he saw it 
all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. 
And who shall say that he did not? For 
what is the gift of the poet and the artist 
except to see the sights that others cannot 
see and to hear the sounds that others 
cannot hear? 


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PICTURES BY FRANK BOYD 


UGUST and his brothers and sisters had been kept 
watm through the long winters in the Tyrol by a 
great stove. Made by a famous craftsman and artist, 
this stove had been in August’s family for many years 
and the little boy loved it. When his father decides to 
sell the stove August is broken-hearted and decides to 
follow it wherever it goes. Through many hard days 
and nights August travels curled up inside the stove. es 
The accounts of his adventures make a charming story. — i 
The colorful background of the Austrian Tyrol gives | 

a chance for interesting illustration. Frank Boyd's pic. — 
tures of the life of these simple country people are excel- 
lently suited to the charming style of Ouida. 


